Encyclopedia of American Studies

Docudrama

Docudramas are films in which historical or contemporary events are reenacted and real people are portrayed. The practice of mixing fact and fiction is rooted in early-twentieth-century documentary and historical films. Prior to World War I audiences wanted to witness current events on film, but cumbersome, hand-cranked cameras could rarely be where things actually happened. Action was therefore recreated, relying on a naive audience's credulity. As early as 1898 "news" footage of a Spanish-American War naval battle was mocked up with models in a New York studio, and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 was reconstructed on a studio tabletop. Audiences soon got wise, and filmmakers began their long search for authenticity. This led to both continual technological improvements in camera, sound, and editing equipment and later, paradoxically, to audiences' suspicion of the documentary. Increasingly media-literate audiences have questioned the old wisdom that "the camera cannot lie."

Documentary films began to be distinguished from actuality and newsreel in the 1920s. Filmmakers dramatized partly to counteract technical limitations and partly for artistic reasons (narrative gave shape and character interest to their films). Robert Flaherty's 1922 Nanook of the North is sometimes called the first documentary, yet he directed real Inuits in reconstructed scenes of adventure in a film intended to entertain and instruct. New Deal documentaries of the 1930s included scripted commentary as well as acted "set ups" in, for example, Pare Lorentz's films. New sound technology was also cumbersome and increased the need to fictionalize. Between the wars there was interest in the documentary concept in many of the arts, and mixing modes was seen not as fakery but rather as a way of heightening realism and increasing social relevance. Writers, such as John Dos Passos, included factual material in their novels; new photojournal magazines used documentary photography to portray the Great Depression; and the Federal Theater Project had a "living newspaper unit" that used stories from the news and American history to make plays. In both the United States and Europe, dramatization occurred whenever cameras and microphones had not witnessed the original action, or where the original action was inaccessible to the filmmaker. Only through such means could important sociopolitical subjects be screened.

For the famous American newsreel March of Time (1935�1951), Louis de Rochemont openly encouraged his film crews to use actors to portray leading political figures and to recreate news stories, mixing real people, authentic footage, and acted performance. Documentary influenced fiction film, too, its techniques heightening the realism of social and historical films such as Warner Brothers' "social problem" dramas and the Hollywood "biopic" (a film depicting a well-known individual's life story). The match between serious fiction film and documentary was even more evident in World War II information and propaganda movies. Such films as William Wyler's The Memphis Belle (1944) and the wartime fiction The Story of GI Joe (1945) are often described as "documentary-style," "semidocumentary," or "documentary dramas." They were grounded in realistic acting and film styles, and they often used opening and closing captions and voice-over narration to make direct links with the real-world events being portrayed.

Docudrama (a shortening of documentary drama) is now the most common term for mixed-form screen dramas for cinema and television, and American network television has been vital to its postwar development. Television also suffered from limited technology in the early days; for example, the studio-bound Armstrong Circle Theatre drama anthology series (1955�1963) used documentary film inserts to lend authority to its fact-based scenarios. This method became obsolete when direct cinema (handheld cameras and synchronized sound) began to be used in the late 1950s, for example, in Robert Drew and Richard Leacock's 1960 documentary Primary. When the major studios began to produce films for television in the late 1960s, there was a marked increase in docudrama production. Films with factual narratives offered significant advantages to hard-pressed executives needing to fill schedules: items from the news and history were ready-made "treatments" to work on; movie-of-the-week docudramas were guaranteed publicity from news coverage and high school history lessons.

Television docudrama subjects are usually more parochial than their cinema equivalents, but some films such as Brian's Song (1971) have proved popular enough to be repeated and shown theatrically. Cinema docudrama usually features stories of more international interest�for example, Oliver Stone's JFK (1991)�but they too are driven by a dramatic narrative with close similarities to fiction film. Docudramas are now a staple product of the networks and of independent film companies and such cable channels as Home Box Office (HBO). Their tendency toward melodrama stems from the commercial priorities of American television, in contrast to the journalistic tradition of British television dramadoc. Britain's 1990 Granada/HBO broadcast Investigation: Inside a Terrorist Bombing significantly contributed to a British campaign to free the "Birmingham 6"�Irishmen wrongly convicted of a 1972 Irish Republican Army bomb incident. Generally, however, docudramas tend to be dismissed by critics as primarily interested in tabloid sensation or individual psychosocial problems.

Docudrama is a distinctively twentieth-century form dependent on the history of film and television. Although many other terms and phrases have been coined (faction, fact-fiction, fact-based drama, based on fact, based on a true story, dramatic reconstruction, trauma drama), docudrama remains the most widely understood. In the late twentieth century, lightweight cameras, " steadicam" technology, and the digital manipulation of images began to make fiction seem more real, threatening the former authority of documentary. All this sharpened the critical debate: the question of whether docudramas are fact or fiction, true or false, signaled a cultural fascination with this often controversial genre. These "true stories" of the cinema and television challenged viewers' understanding of the real, tested their sense of the limits of representation, and raised important ethical questions (about television's claim to both access and represent reality, and about its precarious balance between the private and the public). Calls for program regulation, increased legal activity involving docudrama, regular controversy, and an ongoing public fascination with other people's lives ensured the survival of, and debate about, docudrama in the twenty-first century.

Derek Paget

Bibliography

Bignell, Jonathan, The Television Handbook (Routledge 2005).

Bruzzi, Stella, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2006).

Custen, George Frederick, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (Rutgers Univ. Press 1992).

Hight, Craig and Jane Roscoe, Making It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester Univ. Press 2002).

Juhasz, Alexander and Jesse Lerner, F Is For Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing (Univ. of Minn. Press 2006).

Lipkin, Steven, Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice (Southern Ill. Univ. 2002).

Mittel, Jason, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge 2004).

Paget, Derek, No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television (St. Martin's 1998).

Poindexter, Mark, ABC's The Path to 9/11 , Terror-Management Theory, and the American Monomyth, Film & History 38 (2008):55�66.

Rhodes, Gary Don and John Parris Spring, eds., Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (McFarland 2005).

Rollins, Peter C. and Gary Edgerton, Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (Univ. Press of Ky. 2003).

Rosenthal, Alan, ed., Why Docudrama?: Fact-Fiction on Film and TV (Southern Ill. Univ. Press 1999).

Sobchack, Vivian, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (Routledge 1996).

Toplin, Robert Brent, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Univ. of Ill. Press 1996).